Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 103.djvu/31

Rh laments, most musical, most melancholy, as "Gane were but the winter-cauld," such stirring chansons as "A Wet Sheet and a Flowing Sea,"—or again, "rustic epics" like "The Maid of Elvar," and prose fictions like "Paul Jones" and "Sir Michael Scott." No wonder, then, at the stonemason's bidding for Johnson's Lives of the Poets—his gladsome expenditure of three and elevenpence on the four volumes, and his fine "refusal to deal" with the disappointed bibliophile. And now his son tells us, "From this acquisition (gained by the sweat of the brow, in later years honoured with a better binding) my father learnt much, and I have learnt something. … To my father's cheap but highly-prized acquisition the public is mainly indebted for a good work (the Lives of the British Painters, Sculptors, and Architects), and in that edition I first read Johnson, and determined, twenty years ago to become his editor." And hen we behold the fulfilment of that resolve, in such an edition as the elder Cunningham would have eagerly bid something more than three and elevenpence for, could old Ebony but have put it up for public competition.

During the interval of years between now and then, there has been no growing acceptance, but the reverse, of Johnson's Lives of the Poets. His criticisms are of the eighteenth century, and it is now the nineteenth, and the better half of that too gone. To the nineteenth century belong poetical tastes of profounder sensibility, and critical judgments of more subtle scrutiny, nobler aspirations, finer sympathies, deeper searchings of heart, than to its predecessor. Wordsworth has sung to us since Johnson's day, and Goethe has mooted new questions of thought and new modes of culture, and our minstrels are such as Tennyson and the Brownings; and our critics are such as the Coleridges, and Hare, and Henry Taylor, and De Quincey, and Carlyle; and our philosophers are such as broach and canvass vexed questions undreamt of in his (rather "mild") philosophy. Accordingly, it is objected by some, that to reprint Johnson's Lives at all is a very work of supererogation, and that to reprint it in such a form, and with such aids and appliances to boot (in the way of costly paper, handsome print, "painful" editor, &c.), as distinguish Murray's British Classics, is simply to be deprecated as either a mistake or a piece of mischief—a mistake, if on the presumption that there is a demand for the present supply; a mischief, if with assurance that the supply will beget the demand. Apart, moreover, from their general protest against Johnson as an unqualified teacher in the province of verse, and a blind leader of blind students, the objectors will urge a special demur to the nature of this work, in the compilation of which the Doctor was made to fetch and carry pretty much at the will of his employers, the booksellers. Not only is there an objection to Johnson's born-and-bred inaptitude to criticise the divine art, hut to the manner in which he suffered even what aptitude he had, to be hampered by the trade policy of his illiterate paymasters, to be cabin'd, crib'd, confined, by the state of this dull bibliopole's remainders and that enterprising publisher's dead stock. Such was the condition of trade and taste at the time, that in the "Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets," by the Leviathan of then extant critics, we find no such person as Geoffrey Chaucer, but in his room a select coterie of the caste of William King and Thomas Yalden; no one answering to